As the powers and capabilities of computers continue to expand, the widespread use and popularity of content items, such as video games, also continue to rapidly increase. As an example, modern video games may often include highly complex scenes with highly detailed and complicated objects, such as characters, weapons, vehicles, clouds, forests, and water. Additionally, scenes within modem video games may often have a number of associated light sources that interact with these objects at, for example, different angles, distances, and intensities. Also, in some cases, light may be obstructed by various objects, thereby causing shadows to be displayed on various surfaces of the objects. While these and other characteristics of video games are often highly attractive to video game consumers, they may often require large amounts of computing resources in order to be generated for presentation. Some computing systems may sometimes be unable to provide the necessary resources or may be forced to divert resources from other important operations.